Highlights from my conversation with Pam:

– I was excited to have Pam on the show because I get a lot of questions about making new friends. There’s not one right way to do it. But Pam has definitely learned a lot from moving at 57 and being extremely intentional about it.

– Pam had a robust social life in Houston for 20 years before she and her husband moved to Nashville when she was 57-years-old.

The Beginning of Pam’s Project to Try One New Thing Every Day

PAM: “I like homework assignments and accountability, and I thought, I’m just going to do one new thing every day, and then that will make me feel like I’ve done something towards making new friends in the community. . . I Googled and I went through the free magazines that you find around town and made a huge list of what I could do and plastered it all over my laundry room. I thought, okay, I have nothing to lose. I’ll give it a try.”

PAM: “I went to different grocery stores. It’s a little bit easier when you’re in a new environment because everything is new and different. I walked in different parks. I checked out different coffee shops, drove new routes home. I went to a bookstore, that was the new thing for that day, but found out that they had several different book clubs and author events that they offered. And so I came back to those. I went to a cute fabric store and decided that I was going to dig my old sewing machine out and try and make something. I went to an art supply store and wandered around for a while. I volunteered at the Country Music Hall of Fame. If you’ve ever been to Nashville, you know how great that is. 

I went to a lot of different exercise classes. Most places have programs where you can try one class for free to test out their facility, and I ended up joining the Y because they had a lot of different classes. I went to yoga and Pilates and Zumba and different weights classes. . .  I became more intentional because as I drove home from the grocery store, I would see a place that I wanted to come back to and pop in. . . I went to Marine Week.

And I will say that doing all these things was wonderful. I didn’t realize all the good that would come out of it at that time. I just thought that it gave me something else to focus on other than the fact that I didn’t have any friends.”

Accepting that Friendships Will be Casual at First

PAM: “As I was doing all these things, I was meeting people, but I wasn’t really developing friends. But as I said, good things were coming out of it, which I was to find out later.

NINA: “I think that’s an important point–there’s a difference between participating and forming a relationship, but you have to do part A before part B will come. . . You have to even accept that for a long time, the relationship may just exist in the activity and that’s okay too. And it’s a solution to a certain kind of loneliness. It’s not the kind of friendship in those beginning points where that person is going to show up with food when somebody in your house is sick. That comes later. But it’s still nice to have familiar faces in a new town. My message to people is that I think we have to be more open to the idea that not every friendship has to be the closest friendship. There is a place in our lives for those more casual connections and certainly in a new city, that is the place to start.”

Accepting That When You’re New, The Hard Work Falls on Your Shoulders

PAM: “I decided I would up my game a bit and I went to these exercise classes and started approaching people. It was scary, but I would strike up a conversation and say, would you like to go get a coffee? And I did go get a coffee with three or four women on separate occasions. Three of them didn’t really work out, I knew we weren’t going to be friends. But the fourth person, who’s a dear friend of mine now, we clicked. She said, I’d like to have you and a couple of other friends over for a glass of wine so you can meet everyone.

And things started rolling from there. One of the women I had coffee with, although we didn’t become friends, she invited me to her house for one of these clothing presentations. . . So I went and one of the women there was in a golf group. I like to play golf. She invited me, and I’m still playing in that golf group. So that was a big turnaround.”